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Friday, November 23, 2012

BB41 - Screenplay

Blog Banter 41: Director's Cut

The universe of EVE is not without its drama and epic stories, both in and out of game. Imagine a publisher, movie studio or television network asked you to prepare a pitch for a new brand of EVE-flavoured entertainment. This could be your big break, what would be your synopsis to deliver New Eden to a wider audience?

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Eve is an amazing setting in which to set a story, be it movie or novel or TV series. It has it all: huge universe, diverse cultures, exotic locales, and conflict. Lots and lots of conflict. Struggles. Successes... and abysmal failures.

As players, we might be inclined to create a story based on the point of view of capsuleers. After all, we all feel like heroes of our own stories and thus it makes sense that we should want to chronicle our adventures, or adventures of people like us. This would be a mistake.

For wider audience acceptance, we would quickly find that they cannot relate to all-powerful man-children who act on whims and flights of fancy and can go anywhere, and due to the nature of their immortality, suffer no ill effects. In the Eve universe, capsuleers are the 1%, they are the 0.001%.

No, I would aim for a more compelling story based on the trials and tribulations of being a normal person (or at least a non-capsuleer) trying to make it in an extremely hostile universe. A person for whom death is final, there is no escape from the trap, and a system away might as well be on the other side of infinity.

So with stipulation out of the way, what story would I tell?

I'd use a station as the main setting. Huge technological marvels with throngs of crowds from across the cluster, multiple classes of people from the filthy rich to the lowest labourer, crime, weapons, black markets, drugs, sex, religion, culture clashes... you can have it all in one self contained broiler. And space ships.

I would probably make a movie or novel with our protagonist being some agent or spy for a shadowy organization trying to steal something from a powerful shadowy organization. Good and bad are relative in this moral morass; we'll cheer for our protagonist because we share his point of view, but not paint him in the explicit tough-guy-with-heart-of-gold cliche. I'm so tired of that trope.

The antagonist could be the top boss of the organization our hero is trying to infiltrate, but that it not as interesting as the main antagonist being his opposite number in the enemy organization, a security officer or a highly trained assassin who challenges our hero and in the second act defeats the him (although he escapes death in some manner). Then in the third act he can overcome his foe with climatic fight and swelling music.

Yeah, I know, the story is very boilerplate with only the setting being used from Eve, but if you are aiming to expose Eve's universe to a wider audience you need to appeal to a wider audience in the process.

Damn. I want to watch this movie. It could be really really good popcorn flick.

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